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The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary
Let’s talk about where your soul is going after you die.
A heavy way to start the article, eh? Unfortunately, this type of heavy handed language is often used by Christians to imply that non-believers or even Christians with the ‘wrong’ theology will go to hell. Not just go to hell, but go to hell FOREVER!
This frankly insane strategy has been quite successful, especially in Protestant culture. The threat of hellfire and brimstone and being poked by a demon’s trident for eternity is extremely effective at scaring some people into a brittle, false kind of faith.
Especially sensitive, neurotic, and generally imaginative types like myself.
Sadly though, while it may bring some people back to faith and have use on the margins, it tends to drive people away from Christianity more than anything. Almost every Christian apostate I’ve talked to has some story of religious trauma, where their parent or friend or pastor told them if they didn’t live a perfectly saintly life, they were going to hell.
They then obsessed over their eternal fate until they got so neurotic, so afraid, so twisted up inside they had to decide that the whole damn religion was fake. And honestly, I don’t even blame them.
So this article is meant as a quick overview of the idea of eternal hell - where it came from, and whether or not it’s valid. To be clear, this is just my own research to get a basic understanding, I’m not a theologian and I won’t be going extremely into the depths on this one.
I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured brutally for all eternity. It simply makes no sense whatsoever.
After living as an atheist/buddhist for over ten years, I followed my moral intuition and the voice of God in my heart to Christ and the Orthodox church, so I was conflicted when I first started wondering about the fate of the damned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many others in the Orthodox and Catholic churches felt the same way, and that the argument against eternal punishment had a long and storied history.
Some basic definitions:
Universalist: Holds that all will ultimately be saved
Infernalist: Holds that some face eternal punishment from God
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The Bible Said So
If you were raised by a certain type of Christian parent, you’ve probably been threatened with hell.
It’s sadly common in Christian circles: “do X or you’ll go to hell!” The fact that we casually threaten children with eternal torment is a bit crazy, but hey, culture is weird sometimes.
Where does this come from? Well, there are a lot of admonitions in Scripture about how sin leads to punishment in the afterlife:
Matthew 25:45
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Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
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And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
Thessalonians 1:7
- They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…
Revelation 14:10
- And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.
Now, a straightforward reading of the English here would indicate okay, yes, if we are sinners in this life, or at least don’t pass the bar for God, we go to hell forever. To suffer, and be tormented, over and over and over, without ceasing.
Pretty scary stuff.
However, many scholars have argued that these translations are… faulty, to say the least. The argument typically hinges on the translation of the Greek phrase “kolasin aiōnion,” which has often been translated as “eternal punishment,” and the Greek phrase “eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn,” translated as “forever and ever.”
The problem comes in when you realize that the word “aiōnion” has a dual meaning in ancient Greek - it could either mean:
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A really long time! Literally “until the end of the age,” which in practice just meant a really long time
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Actually forever, infinite, eternal. Will never cease. Trillions and trillions of years go by and it’s still happening
The debate hinges on which of the two time periods these phrases actually refer to. Universalists are not just pulling this out of their rear ends, so to speak. There are uses of aiōnion in the Old Testament that clearly refer to a temporary happening, such as when Moses blessed the “eternal hills” of Joseph’s land in Deuteronomy 33:15, or the “eternal fire” of Sodom in Jude 7.
Another major debate is over the doctrine of “apokatastasis,” or the promised restoration of all things in eternity. Many classical writers, most notably Saint Paul, talked about this concept. Specifically:
Colossians 1:19–20 “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”.
1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved.”
2 Peter 3:9 “not wishing any to perish.”
1 Corinthians 15:22–28 “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ… that God may be all in all.”
I could go on and on. There are all sorts of minor debates over other terms, and theological minutiae. Suffice to say, there is no clear cut, black and white answer as to whether Scripture declares eternal punishment, and the popularity of the infernalist versus universalist position has oscillated back and forth throughout Christian history depending on when and where you look.
The Church Said So
For the Orthodox and Catholic (and some Protestant) believers, we luckily have an institution to interpret Scripture for us: the Church!
Pretty much every infernalist, when backed into a corner and made to doubt their understanding of eternal torment, will immediately turn and say, “well the Church teaches that the damned suffer in hell forever!”
As in the section above, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t completely right.
So, what does the Church actually say? I’ll focus on the Orthodox church here, but ultimately the major decision point was well before the schism of 1054, so this section applies mostly to both Catholic and Orthodox doctrine.
This discussion centers around the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Imagine a room full of men with long beards, in fancy robes, full of the Holy Spirit, conferring in the heart of Constantinople, at the Hagia Sophia. (Arguably the most beautiful church in the world at the time, though sadly a mosque now.)
So all of these guys get together to discuss some problems in the early church, and figure out what was going on. A side character in this drama, a man by the name of Origen of Alexandria, had caused some problems with interpretations of his teachings a while back, and he was on the list to discuss.
Specifically, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls before birth, and reincarnation after death, as well as universal reconciliation or the restoration of all things and beings. Even the devil, and fallen angels!
The council ruled definitively that this specific system of Origen’s belief as a whole was condemned. The line that is often trotted out, which I admit looks quite bad, is as follows:
“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration [apokatastasis] will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”
The way most universalists combat this objection is that:
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This was referring to Origen’s overall system, not specifically claiming that the damned are tormented forever or even giving a concrete definition of punishment in the afterlife
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The ‘restoration’ discussed here is actually referring more to Origen’s belief that humans existed somehow outside the body before birth, and would be ‘restored’ to that state afterward. Not how most universalists use ‘restored’, to mean reconciled to God.
To be absolutely clear on this point: there is no specific Church dogma that definitively declares the damned are punished eternally. In fact, glorified saints such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Isaac the Syrian explicitly taught universalism and held universalist positions until they died, and have not been condemned by the Church.
I emphasize this because when you wade into online discussions of universalism versus infernalism, the argument via doctrine is by far the most common problem infernalist argument you see. Sadly many people see this argument then simply take it at face value that their church believes the damned will be tortured forever, not being bothered enough by that teaching to actually check for themselves.
So again, in terms of actual church doctrine, just like with interpretation of Scripture, we have a somewhat murky picture in which neither the universalist or infernalist position clearly wins out.
I’ll add as well that at least in the Orthodox tradition, church doctrine is not strictly binding forever and ever as it is in the Catholic church. The councils are not perfectly infallible. Through consensus and the living tradition of the Church, our dogmas and doctrines can be updated as new information or revelations come out.
So even if there was a strong consensus that infernalism was what a council taught, it could be changed!
Sadly, many ‘Orthobros’ in America have converted from Protestant backgrounds where “sola scriptura,” or a strict black and white, legalistic understanding of the faith, is the default worldview. Even after conversion, this way of seeing the faith is carried over, and they tend to try and use church councils as a bludgeon, with a liberal use of the words “heresy” and “heretic.”
You’d think if they cared so strictly about the rules they would let the bishops decide who was heretical instead of taking it upon themselves, but that’s how it goes on the internet.
Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie
Finally I will give a notable mention to another couple of arguments.
The first goes something like: “life has no meaning if there isn’t eternal punishment.”
Another argument is that the doctrine of eternal hell acts as some sort of “Noble Lie,” where it’s not really true, but the masses just aren’t ready to understand the truth and they will act up if they learn that they’ll eventually go to heaven.
Speaking about universal salvation online, I’ve gotten well over a dozen responses forwarding these lines of belief. They aren’t very compelling to me, so my only guess here is that these people have a misunderstanding of the actual universalist position.
When a universalist argues that God will reconcile all things in the end, they are not saying that hell doesn’t exist. Instead, simply that hell is not eternal.
For instance, if you have somebody really bad like an unrepentant serial killer die and go to hell, they may be there a long, long time. Perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, subjectively. That still constitutes an extremely strong reason to avoid sin, and work out your salvation! Just because hell isn’t fully, forever eternal, does not mean hell has no value as a deterrent.
Eternity, forever, infinite, etc. are complicated concepts, and it makes sense as to why people wouldn’t really grok it or be able to reason about it well. Heck, I don’t even understand it fully, and there are some tricky arguments about how true Eternity is “outside of time” that make eternal punishment make sense. I don’t want to get into that here.
In conclusion, if you are a Christian of any stripe, even Orthodox or Catholic, and you want to hope for universal salvation, you are well within your rights to do so. No church has explicitly condemned it, and there are very good reasons to believe it. As I owned up to in the beginning of this article, I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?
Be warned however that if you decide to hope for universal salvation, you may want to keep it close to your chest. The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with. I’d caution you against arguing too much, unless you’re like me, and simply can’t help yourself.
All this being said, I also want to emphasize the fact that not all universalists are going to heaven, and not all infernalists are going to hell. Having the ‘right belief’ does not give us a free pass. We must love one another, and purify our hearts to the best of our ability. As a wise friend cautioned me during this discussion:
Where is the heart? are there tears of longing for light, and love, and holiness, for the capacity to heal others? on either side of the universalist/infernalist debate, there are people whose hearts are longing for God, and people who are just manipulating words with pride and worshipping their minds.
I hope this article has been helpful or at least interesting for you, and may we all move our hearts closer to God.
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Notes -
"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit"
To which I would retort, "thank goodness we have the expectation of divine rewards!". I'd much rather live in a world where extrinsic pressure constrains intrinsic depravity, especially if that extrinsic pressure comes "for free" (vs, eg, a heavy police state).
I resemble that remark!
I think defining the frame in this way is too constraining. Will there be universal reconciliation (that is, every soul reconciled with his Creator)? Unlikely: only those who come to faith and repentance through Jesus will be reconciled to the triune God. Will those not reconciled be faced with eternal torment? The Bible doesn't definitively state that either. Certain particularly evil creatures are destined for the lake of fire, but it is possible that the vast majority of humans who reject Christ will simply be eternally separated from their Creator (which would certainly be a regretful and sorrowful condition, one that might be characterized as an outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth).
While I don't see much evidence for the Universalist position in the Bible(1), that doesn't mean that I don't hope for it. My church regularly prays for "the salvation of all" while believing in limited salvation (and many believing in limited atonement).
One of Man's most pernicious and perpetual tendencies it to make God in our own image. When severe corporeal punishment was synonymous with justice, God's judgment was emphasized. Now that complacency and comfort are idolized, God's love and forgiveness is emphasized. Christians I otherwise respect, including C.S. Lewis and Bishop Barron, fall into this trap. Modern man is in love with his own mind(2) and thinks that God can be constrained or limited by our own (created!) minds, and fits him neatly into a box of our own making.
I don't think anyone has a definitive answer to what the afterlife or the new heavens and the new earth will be like. The Bible gives us glimpses, as if seen through a glass darkly, but I don't think it is for any human this side of eternity to have a clear frame (or, in our finitude, to even partially grasp) what that future may be like. Scripture is inspired and God-breathed, but God chose to impart only a partial peek into the eternal mysteries through Scripture. What I do know is that God is good (and would be so even/especially if non-believers are eternally tormented).
(1) Even John, the apostle most given to poetic imagery and speaks the most of love, has the most vivid descriptions of the punishment and doom waiting those who resist God.
(2) And, gnostically, hates his own body.
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That was a nice, succinct read however this one feels a bit incomplete (or could've been expanded on):
I will admit I'm not very familiar with Origen, but a cursory peep into his wikipedia says he explicitly rejected the doctrine of reincarnation. So what happens after a damned soul is restored to this pre-bodily state? Do they remain in that ghostly state forever, away from God's Kingdom and his saved children? If so, how is that better than Eternal Hellfire?
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My sense from the text is probably annihilationism.
You probably have to go more for AI atheists to find a god that makes future contingents like sea battles or box picking necessary and then also sets up a basilisk to torture you forever for the future contingents that it retroactively would have made necessary.
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Thanks a lot, Thomas, now I have the song stick in my head every time I check themotte...
Will Ferrell is now dancing in my head rent-free as well.
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My pleasure! I see my plan worked, mwuahahahaha!
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I do have to say, I always thought the "noble lie" or using hell as a way to motivate people was just dumb. Whatever happened to intrinsic motivation? Whatever happened to people behaving well because it makes our time on earth more pleasant/civilized etc? But I've always been one of the "good kids" so I have a really hard time getting into the mindset of someone who just always gives in to their vices and doesn't care who they hurt or the damage they cause along the way. But fear of hell was never a motivator for me.
At the end of the day, while I do reject eternal conscious torment, I think I'm more of an annihilationist for a few reasons.
(1) Apeirophobia, fear of eternity. Set aside the hell part for a second. Even as a kid I was absolutely horrified by the idea of heaven, of just ...existing without end. OK, you've done everything you wanted to do, you've indulged all your desires so, now what? I actually couldn't watch the ending of The Good Place (and still haven't) (SPOILERS) because that whole last season was just too psychologically uncomfortable and I could tell where they were going with it. And I couldn't bear it because it validated the notion that an eternal afterlife as ultimately doomed no matter how nice it is.
(2) Honestly just the moral outrage of having to share heaven with Hitler or Charles Manson or a rapist sharing heaven with their victims, etc. I think there is a moral instinct that many people don't "deserve" to go to hell but there are absolutely some people who do. Justice is meaningless, a moral and ethical framework is meaningless if it just all gets washed out in the end.
(3) This is related to (2), but in your essay you've cherry-picked all the verses that support universalism. There is plenty of material that supports just punishment as well. Jesus tells several parables about basically the insiders and the outsiders. Look at the parables of the sheep and the goats or the wedding feast or the weeds.
Matthew 25:31-46 for the sheep and the goats - "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." And it goes on to say that the sheep who did the right things will be welcomed into the kingdom, while the goats will be cast away.
Matthew 13:24-30, the wheat and the weeds - "Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn."
Matthew 22:1-14, the wedding banquet in which not everyone is invited. Verse 14 rather cryptically says, "For many are invited, but few are chosen."
There are many commentaries and discussions about what exactly these and similar passages mean, but it's clear that Jesus's words indicate a distinction, a separation between two groups of people, those in the kingdom and those out of it. These passages coexist with the more universalist passages and if you're going to study the Bible seriously and develop an afterlife theology based on it, then I think you've got to somehow account for all of it. To me, annihilationism does the best job at retaining the balance of justice while not requiring unconscionable eternal torture.
Yeah I was quite surprised how many people trotted out this argument when I started discussing universalism. Seems quite common, for some ridiculous reason. I agree that it has never been motivating for me, instead it's the exact opposite. The fear of eternal hell always just crippled me when I believed in it.
There is absolutely a lot of Scripture that indicates infernalism, or annihilationism as you say. I admitted in the post that I didn't do an exhaustive exegesis on all of Scripture, and frankly the more obvious answer is a sort of infernalistic or annihilistic view. However, I found enough arguments to at least hope for universalism! Perhaps I wrote too strongly.
That being said, there's no reason there can't be a separation and an eventual reconnection. God can do what He wants. Perhaps after the end of this age, those sent to damnation are given another chance in another universe, in a completely different way of life. Perhaps they are indeed annihilated. Perhaps it's something far stranger! We simply don't know, and will never truly know.
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I can't tell you how much I agree. I came to the same conclusion a few years back, persuaded by similar arguments. I have some notes. First, your section on aiōniois is pretty good, but you could make a stronger case by also mentioning Romans 16:25:
Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past
The greek translation of the word "ages" here is aiōniois. A lot of bible "original word" explainers will translate this directly as being eternal, but that can't possibly be right - Paul is clearly speaking about a finite time here.
A few people elsewhere have mentioned that this whole thing stems from a desire to make Christianity conform to our own flawed internal morals. If the charge is laid against me, I can't dismiss it. I have to question the premise instead. My whole morality is informed by Christianity, without it I'd have to build morals out of, what, evolutionary psychology? And from within the moral system of Christianity, I'm seeing a contradiction. God is supposedly a grand orchestrator with a perfect plan that will make everything all right in the end if we will only trust it. Yet if we take the Infernalist teachings of an eternal hell at face value, God is going to fumble and let not only some, but most of His children be lost forever. We're supposed to be fighting for the winning side, but satan is going to get the larger portion of humanity?
Once you look past the authorities and their grand proclamations of Hell being eternal, most of the arguments for how a benevolent God could possibly allow such a thing strike me as weak - even the higher quality arguments proposed by great figures like CS Lewis don't stand up to scrutiny. It ultimately comes down to whose authority you trust, and the original scriptures muddled through the lens of our modern English translations.
I'm afraid I can't say I trust the Catholic or Orthodox churches on this point. I've spent some time looking into the state of Universalism in the early Christian church, a history you touched on in the comments on Origen. My view is mostly informed by this document [WARNING: Long and dry read, I don't expect commenters to read this], which argues that Universalism was a majority or at least commonplace view in the early church. If that's right, then the whole thing reeks of a doctrine endorsed for social engineering purposes. The early Catholic church is ascendant, they're taking more power in the Roman empire, they need to think more about how to keep the peasants in line... oh, hello there Augustine! We don't know enough to say for sure that's what happened, but there's enough things pointing in that direction to construct a narrative.
In the end, however we argue about it, we'll meet God one day and have to accept the truth, whatever it turns out to be. Thank you for posting this. I've really enjoyed your posts on your faith journey and would like to see more.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I could've gone deeper into the Scriptural arguments, but I felt I had enough to at least question the premise that infernalism had to be right in an absolute sense. I know that it goes far deeper than what I laid out!
Very strongly agree. As I pointed out a couple times, a benevolent God torturing His creations for eternity just makes zero sense to me. The argument is always "but we need free will!" which I actually didn't cover here, to my chagrin, but that feels extremely weak to me as well. So God created us knowing many would choose eternal torment... that's still evil!
I mean yeah it's obvious to me at least that the temporal church has been corrupted throughout history and used doctrine as a blunt instrument to force control onto people. I don't think any clear eyed Christian with a good grasp of history can argue any differently.
To me it helps that I'm Orthodox, as the official Orthodox position leaves a lot more room for the temporal church being fallible than the Catholic position does. You wouldn't know it interacting with many Orthobros online, but there is plenty of dissent amongst the Orthodox church about the decisions of the hierarchy. Orthodoxy is, by it's nature, far more democratic and council oriented than Rome, so it feels far more flexible and alive to me, in terms of doctrine.
Hey I really appreciate this sentiment! I have definitely hesitated at some points since a few folks seem to be kind of surprised or even offended I'm posting it here. But I have also gotten enough positive feedback that I feel it makes sense to share here.
I'll second that I also appreciate these posts :)
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I am fond of the CS Lewis formulation of hell (as I am with many other topics in Christian thought): people in hell are there by choice, not because God bars them from heaven. The suffering of hell, then, is not a divine punishment, but ultimately self-inflicted (since God is the source of all good things, by choosing to set yourself apart from him one chooses to forego good things and only suffering can be left). I think that Lewis illustrates this interpretation of hell quite nicely in The Great Divorce, where he envisions hell as a dreary gray town where most people are insistent on staying, even though they hate it there, because they believe that the bus that takes one up to heaven is some manner of trick and that they are better off where they are. But for those who do choose to go, they find in the end that hell was really purgatory for them, once they left it behind.
As far as the topic of universalism goes, I can't say I really know one way or the other. I certainly hope that all will be saved, and I like Bishop Barron's phrasing of "we may hope that hell is empty". And I must confess that the victory of Jesus over sin feels somewhat hollow if, in the end, there are those who will not be saved, even if it be by their own choice. However, I do believe that God respects our free will, even if we choose to be apart from him, even if we never come to our senses and realize that we made a bad choice by remaining apart from him. And given human nature, it is difficult to imagine that every single human will ultimately choose to humble his heart and say to God "thy will be done". So it is therefore hard to imagine that hell will be empty, in the end. But I do hope it will be, even though I doubt if I'll ever have certainty in this life.
Back when I was a Christian, my understanding was similar. You die and realize that you fucked up, that you missed your only chance to adhere to the divine. Compared to eternal bliss that overwhelms your nature, anything is eternal punishment, you don't need to invent infernal torture chambers. Unlike Lewis', it's not a hell of continued voluntary choice
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You know, everyone trots out Lewis when this topic comes up, and I understand why. The Great Divorce is fine. But I am genuinely curious, is there no one else who has tried to do something similar and actually sketch out a theologically serious imagining of what the afterlife might be like? There have to be others out there but this is always the one that's recommended.
My understanding is that it's rare to find a writer like Lewis who is both skilled enough to paint a good picture, and schizo enough to actually try it. Given that Christ Himself told us we'll never know about the afterlife, and the general attitude of the major churches towards it, most Christian writers are understandable hesitant to tackle that problem. Lewis was quite courageous.
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I enjoyed the Great Divorce, but found it somewhat unsatisfactory! I guess my view is that if people have literally forever to choose, they will eventually get fed up with hell and come to God, because He will not abandon them.
That being said, some sort of oblivion/destruction of the soul could be feasible after the End of Days, or whatever you want to call it. I don't love it but it's at least a far more justifiable argument compared to eternal conscious torment.
Well, it is fiction of course, and not meant to be taken as an authoritative view on hell. But I would say that my experience with human nature has left me quite convinced that people will not necessarily give up on a mistaken belief, even if it's causing them suffering. An imperfect analogy here would be addicts. My brother in law was an alcoholic, and an outside observer could see how much suffering his drinking was causing for him. Not just that he couldn't hold down a job and all that, but it ruined many of his relationships, left him being angry and bitter on a daily basis, and was destroying his body. Everyone around him, literally everyone, clearly saw that the bottle was destroying him and that he would be better off if he could give it up. But he never could admit that he needed to stop, not up until the day he died. I realize that a human lifetime's scale is very different from forever, and that's what makes the analogy imperfect. But my experience has shown me that the human mind has a great capacity to double down, even in the face of great suffering. So it isn't impossible for me to believe that someone might choose hell for all eternity.
I will say that I think the "eternal conscious torment" theory is bunk. Like you said, it simply does not fit with a supposedly loving God. But even an infinitely loving God can't (or rather won't) force people to love him, so I think that hell as a self-inflicted privation of good, rather than a punishment, makes sense. Beyond that, though, it's hard to say. Perhaps the "souls outside heaven will eventually be annihilated" people are correct, perhaps the "all will eventually choose to submit to God" people are correct, perhaps the "after we die we don't get to change our minds because spiritual beings can't change their minds" people are correct. I don't know, but thankfully it doesn't keep me up at night or anything.
Yeah I'm with you here. I think I am the type of person it does keep up at night, and there are many like me. Even the idea that eternal conscious torment could be true, and the fact that so many Christians loudly proclaim it (falsely) as official church dogma, is unacceptable to me. I'm grateful so many others have done the hard legwork to prove that it isn't necessarily what the church has taught, or what Christ said.
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I admit I find atheists who convert fascinating in a kind of horrified way. I even understand the impulse, to want to believe. Short of having a personal revelation convincing enough to make me believe (and not convince me I am hallucinating or losing my mind), though, I cannot see how I would ever become religious again. I am completely convinced in a materialistic universe, and while the universe is vast and obviously we cannot know everything and God could be hiding in innumerable unfalsifiable ways, nothing, no apologetics, no personal testimonies, no inductive reasoning, has ever been plausible enough to make me abandon the evidence of my senses and my reason.
I am well familiar with the debate over universalism versus infernalism, as you put it, though. It was one of my greatest concerns in my Christian days, and it is the thing I argue with Christians about most often, on the rare occasions I do argue with them now.
From my perspective, universalism is the "nice" and comforting version of salvation that kind Christians who cannot stomach the thought of friends and loved ones burning in hell convince themselves of. Damnation is what those who are either Biblical literalists believe in (and they go through all sorts of mental contortions to convince themselves that it is both a just fate and something they could be at peace with, watching from heaven as their former friends and loved ones scream in hell for eternity), or the unkind Christians who just like the idea of their not-friends getting what's coming to them.
Religious believers, in my experience, choose a priori what they want to believe (whether it is that their enemies will burn, or no one will burn) and fit scripture to match it.
That's not an indictment of you. You're nice and don't want to believe people could burn in hell for eternity, so you found a Biblical interpretation that makes that not true. I've got friends and family who do the same. And to be honest, when I was a believer, my thinking was similar to yours. If I did believe in God, I would not be capable of believing in a supposedly benevolent deity who judges that any mortal, no matter how awful they were in one short mortal lifetime, could possibly deserve to be tortured for all of eternity. Especially if that could be a punishment not just for being evil, but simply for choosing the wrong religion.
But honestly, I don't think your scriptural interpretation is necessarily sounder than that of the infernalists.
You cited a number of verses and Church doctrines used to justify eternal damnation and did your best to explain them away, but it's no less rationalizing than the exclusive salvationists who rationalize in the other direction. I note you did not address John 14:6: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me." This is the verse most often used by fundamentalists to argue for the exclusive salvationist position, that all who do not accept Jesus will go to hell. Of course universalists have a response to that too. But it's all just special pleading.
@rae was a little harsh, but I basically believe the same thing: the God of the Bible is a vengeful Bronze age deity who talks about doing Bronze age god shit to His enemies in the Old Testament, and then comes in with forgiveness and mercy for his enemies in the New Testament, and you have to go through a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself they are the same god.
I'm not particularly well versed on eastern faiths myself (nor am I religious), but how would you feel about a syncretic belief system that adopts a Buddhist/Hinduist style karmic and reincarnation doctrine? Setting aside the inherent fantastical elements, highly specific doctrines and very arbitrary sin criterias, how plausible or attractive would you find a system in which a deity offers an arrangement like this: you rejected the deity (or refused to affirm belief in him) but otherwise lived a morally good life by ordinary standards, so you receive a period in a lesser heaven or favourable intermediate state, after which you are returned to the cycle of rebirth in this world?
PS: I'm aware that both Buddhism and Hinduism encompass a wide array of radically different sects, schools, and interpretations, and I'm not asking you if you're attracted to either, only how you'd feel about the karmic/rebirth arrangement if it was true.
Well, it's more merciful than "Burn in hell forever" but still seems to me pretty arbitrary to decide how long someone suffers based on whether they chose the right menu item.
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The change is older than Jesus. Judaism already was hip among the Romans and the Greeks in the last century BCE the way various Indian stuff was hip with the Europeans and the Americans two millennia later, starting with Helena Blavatsky and Nicholas Roerich and culminating with modern deracinated yoga classes. If you trace this reformism to the Pharisees, the roots of the change lie in the destruction of the First Temple.
I agree that this is an outside perspective. It must be hard to perceive the same change as a sincere believer, even though the same believe can point and laugh at how God conveniently reveals new truths to the Mormons exactly when the US Government starts threatening them.
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There's a lot going on in this conversation, sadly much more than I have time to engage with. One note, though, from what I hope is well-outside the trajectory of expected apologetics, and thus might be of interest.
In World War 2, we burned whole cities to ash. This is a thing that I think most educated people are aware exists, but also have avoided internalizing: we burned those cities and everyone and everything in them, and near as I can tell we, collectively, didn't feel particularly bad about it, and still don't. There's some people who clearly do, and sometimes they make some half-hearted gesture at getting the rest of us to feel bad about it too, but it doesn't really stick.
Now, possibly the people who do feel bad about it are correct, and possibly the people who don't feel bad about it (and I am one of them) are wrong. but if the people who don't feel bad about it aren't wrong, I think you should at least consider the idea that humans have not actually changed much in recorded human history, and consider whether the "bronze age" token actually belongs in that sentence, and how the sentence is changed by removing it.
My impression is that "Bronze age" is expressing the idea that the sorts of actions so-described are things we have moved beyond, evolved past, some embarrassing element of our mythic past. But in fact, our last century was defined by numerous such large-scale "bronze-age" attrocities, and I am not at all confident that the next century will escape being defined by them as well. Far from being an embarrassment that we've moved past, it is an inescapable part of who and what we are, that we will never, ever be rid of. And if that is the case, it seems that the stories you refer to go from alienating and thus useless, to familiar and thus at least potentially enlightening, even if we continue to classify them as myth, even if their only relevance is as a mirror to human nature.
I don't think we have "moved past it" in the sense that humans are substantially different from Bronze age humans. So when I speak of Bronze age morality - slaughtering your enemies and taking their women and not feeling bad about it, doing all the things that KulakRevolt says we should be doing - I'm well aware that that's still with us and only a missed meal away for a lot of people. You may think I am being disparaging, but it's actually rather impressive how the God of the Bible has become a God who now exhorts his followers not to act like that, and it's mostly stuck. Kind of.
I don't think this can only happen with Christianity. Other religions mostly preach not acting like Bronze age barbarians too (Islam, the "religion of peace", tries to sell it too but seems to have been much less successful so far).
How and why Christianity has been more successful at turning the jealous wrathful genocidal god of the Old Testament into the Prince of Peace is a story with many explanations, and obviously a believing Christian's explanation is going to be different than mine. But from an atheist's point of view, it's pretty clearly a neat hat trick. I was not expressing some sneering dismissal of Christianity as worship of a Bronze age god we should have moved past, but I do think Christians, as I said to @SubstantialFrivolity, reason themselves into "This is bad " and then rationalize that their god says "This is bad " when their god clearly does not think this is bad (at least, if you wanted to be a Christian who also believes in slaughtering your enemies and taking their women and not feeling bad about it, there is plenty of Biblical support for that too).
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For what it's worth, that is not what I do. Not on this topic, nor any other topic concerning faith. I've gone from being raised a non-denominational Christian, to agnostic, to being a Christian again, to being Catholic specifically, all on the basis of my ability to discern the truth as best I can. I try to remain open to new ideas or arguments, and not just confirm my biases. I'm not perfect, of course, but I am genuinely trying. So inasmuch as your experience in life includes me (not much, sure, but not zero either), you at least know some religious believers who don't do what you have observed.
I think that "a little harsh" doesn't quite cover it. Rae came in here purely to vent his spleen in a way that was unproductive and frankly a real dick move. I didn't bother to get into it with him because there's no point arguing with someone that angry about the topic that they will go out of their way to shit on someone else's beliefs, but it was a really crappy thing to post.
I’m not angry about it, just confused! I can’t wrap my head around believing in Christianity in that way, although I do find it fascinating as a topic of discussion.
I actually love the trope of God as some sort of cosmic horror like in this excellent short film and to me it makes a lot more sense than any other interpretation.
I don’t understand how the idea that God is benevolent and all powerful became more popular than there being a malevolent or indifferent God out there. Watching someone struggle with the problem of evil is strange to me because you can easily resolve it by saying God is evil/doesn’t care, and nothing really changes about Christianity’s metaphysics. The Bible says God is good but of course it would, that’s from God’s/his prophets’ POV, they’re going to justify their own actions the same way anyone committing evil acts would.
IMO it's hard to call God "evil" if we owe all of existence to him. By that point, "evil" is meaningless. Like calling a fundamental force or physical law evil. Is the Big Bang evil because it created suffering? God also created all that is good, and all that is somewhat neutral or not really the subject of attention. Of course it's ideologically useful for you to call it evil, because you are opposed to Christians and have the incentives to contemn them, their beliefs, and their deity.
FWIW, I'm fully on board with the indifferentist position. God created the universe, sure, why not. But I strongly doubt, even if that is the case, that he cares about us individual humans.
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It is hard to square the story of Jesus (God incarnate) with the idea that God hates or is indifferent to mankind.
It's hard to square the story of Jesus as God incarnate with any part of classical theology (unmoved mover, etc)
Please expand
I wouldn't know where to begin. Jesus moves and changes yet he's the god that is not supposed to do either of those things, if he's omniscient and omnipotent he knows from the start that he'd die on the cross and set up the universe precisely so that it would happen and why would it have any meaning in that case and why would it be a sin that the powers that be and Judas went along with the plan just as he wished would happen.
Although it isn't even just Jesus, basically everything in the Bible, except maybe chapter one of Genesis, works best if you imagine God as a version of Zeus with more superpowers rather than the neoplatonic "thing" in classical theology.
I already don't really follow. I thought the second word of "unmoved mover" was "mover". I didn't think classical theology posited an unmoved unmover.
Jesus is god himself, not a remote controlled puppet.
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Because nobody is going to turn up every Sunday to worship a God who hates them, or at best, doesn't care about them.
And the simplest solution to the problem of evil is that God doesn't exist. Suffering exists because the material universe is indifferent to it.
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No one thinks they do.
I don't think anyone consciously does this. Everyone says they are earnestly seeking the truth and open to being persuaded. All religious believers are rational truth-seekers who genuinely weighed all competing theologies and independently arrived at the most correct one (which just happens to be, 90% of the time, the one they grew up with). I'm sorry, I'm not trying to snark at you, but that's just literally what I hear from every single religious convert, from the Bible-thumping exclusive salvationist to the niqabbed Muslim girl going to an Islamic university.
But without fail, God's personality always reflects the personality of the believer. I've never met an angry, resentful Christian who believed God wanted him to embrace the people he hated in brotherly love- at best he might admit that he has a problem with anger and needs to learn how to forgive (but those fuckers are still gonna burn in hell). I've never met a kind-hearted, forgiving and gentle Christian who was very sad about how God was going to throw his non-Christian neighbors into the Lake of Fire to burn for all eternity, but was nonetheless convinced this was their just reward for denying Christ. God is always cruel or kind in proportion to his followers.
I understand that you cannot know for a fact how a person's mind works, and that it is certainly possible for a person to be lying to you, or even themselves, about the thought process they followed to get to where they are. But it sounds like you're skirting dangerously close to an unfalsifiable belief here, because it seems like you are alleging that even if someone isn't consciously doing confirmation bias rather than truth seeking, that just means they're unconsciously doing that. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but that would be a pretty large claim to make, and also one which is quite unfalsifiable (and should be scrutinized very hard indeed as a result).
If we suppose there exists a religion that is actually true, then presumably a few people have actually found it. But if not, or even if so, then most people, however sincere they are about the reasoning process they used to get there, have convinced themselves of something that is not true, and humans in general are amazingly good at rationalization.
Of course the same would be true of me, if I am in fact wrong about God not existing or your church being false. I think I got here by reason and being open to being convinced, but I know from experience you will have numerous arguments to explain why I have either failed to see the truth or am in denial about it.
Oh, I agree that almost by definition a great many people must be wrong about their religious beliefs. Whether that is a belief in a particular religion or even atheism, there are too many mutually exclusive positions for us all to be right. But it seemed to me that you were saying you doubted people's sincerity in how they arrived at their beliefs, which is quite a different matter. A person can be completely sincere in seeking the truth, genuinely set aside any biases or preconceived notions, and still be wildly wrong. Sincerity in seeking the truth is, unfortunately, no guarantee at all that one has indeed found it. I would therefore say that correctness and sincerity are orthogonal to each other.
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I think it helps that I was never a serious Christian, became an atheist pretty much immediately upon encountering real questions and difficulty as a boy. Falling away from faith and coming back seems like it may be harder, somehow?
But yes, ultimately strict materialism is basically a closed loop, can't be disproven. That itself is part of what made me question it. Then again I'm a bit of a weird Christian anyway.
I appreciate the rest of your points. I'd say that one of the biggest problems with the history of the church is we lose sight of how mysterious Christ is, and how strange the things He said were. David Bentley Hart does a great job explaining this, but the biggest mistake Christians make is that we think it's all figured out. I don't believe it is.
Ultimately in a modern (or post-modern) world we are all interpreting things like Protestants, whether we like it or not. No believer of any religion who wants to live in modernity has the luxury of just blindly believing on what is sometimes wrongly called 'faith.' I am willing to use my reason, my heart, and my moral intuitions in conjunction to inform my beliefs, and don't see a problem with that.
In terms of believing in Christ, I get it! It's weird and crazy and doesn't make a lot of sense. I had personal experiences that convinced me. I'm not here to convince you, if you don't have similar evidence I don't necessarily see myself convincing you. I wouldn't have been convinced.
Frankly I had to go through some horrible shit before I was humbled enough to start questioning my materialistic philosophy. I genuinely hope you don't have to go through anything similar.
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As an non religious guy (cultural Christian?) that enjoys reading about nuances in Christian teaching, I liked this! Sadly, this type of discussion seems pretty rare.
I didn't even know the terms universalism and infernalism but I knew the concepts - nice to put a name to a concept. On the popularity of infernalism, I guess it's because fear of hell is an easy to apply, reasonably powerful motivator that can be taught to children with low effort.
Yes exactly, I think this is a huge factor. In the early church it wasn't nearly as popular, but as the church grew in power and gained more control, we started using more blunt instruments I guess. Protestants really took this to an extreme with their obsession around making absolutely sure they were saved.
Which, you know, if you believe in eternal damnation, makes sense that you would be obsessed with figuring out how to be saved!
Anyway, glad you found it interesting. It is definitely not super common to discuss, largely because the traditional Christian churches are full of people who don't think very deeply about anything and scream "heretic!" any time someone brings up a theological concept that goes against their limited worldview. It has definitely been a frustrating part of my own conversion to Christianity, but luckily there are many intellectual Christians as well, they just tend to be a bit quieter.
At least in the US, I wonder if cultural anti-intellectualism causes the intellectual Christians to stay quieter than they would otherwise be. As if it was something shameful, that they couldn't accept their beliefs on pure faith and needed to waste energy on unimportant theological nuances.
I don't follow intellectual Christian media, so from the outside it mostly looks like pure faith infernalism and/or some distasteful (to me) prosperity theology. Infernalism's dominance repels people like me who would be interested in learning more but hesitate because of the crowd it attracts.
I suspect it's something to do with this, and also the Protestant roots. Protestants took the infernalist rhetoric and turned it up to never before seen extremes. Contemporary Protestant churches have chilled out a lot, but besides the Quakers, most of the early sects were all-in on motivation through fear via fire and brimstone preaching.
This is the point I try to make to other Christians. It also repelled me for a long time. I hope that Christian culture as a whole can move towards more intellectualism and grace, but we'll see.
Didn't Martin Luther, the OG protestant, basically say that as long as you Believe, your sins are forgiven and you avoid hell?
I'm far from a theologian or historian but to me it seems that the "fire and brimstone" preaching was less a general feature of protestantianism and more related to those denominations that originated from Calvinism.
You may be right, though I believe Luther was notoriously anxious about hell himself.
Calvinism and the resulting branches definitely focused on it more though, I agree there.
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If you are relying on your moral intuitions anyway, why even go with the Christian God and have to go through these tortured interpretations to bend the Bible to your moral values? The Biblical God is obviously a wrathful, evil deity who is responsible for the pain and suffering of billions upon billions of humans and engages in cosmic blackmail to get you to love and worship him.
At best, he is callously indifferent and neglectful, at worst, he watches with glee with every child that dies in agony of a cancer he purposefully created. While a father cries holding his daughter’s lifeless hand, God sentences her soul to an eternity of hellfire without a second thought, because he can forgive anything, except not giving him the worship and adulation he desperately craves.
They are the worshippers of a narcissistic, genocidal cosmic horror from the Bronze Age, at least they have the gall to admit that one should live in fear of the monster, rather than pretend it loves us while it spares only the ones it deems sufficiently servile, torturing or annihilating everyone else.
I'm not relying entirely on my moral intuitions, though I am relying on them in terms of finding a church.
The Biblical God is not obviously evil, have you heard of something called the New Testament?
I would continue to reply but the rest of your post shows you aren't interested in actually discussing this, just insulting someone you disagree with.
I’m sorry it came across as insulting, that wasn’t my intention. You’re obviously a very moral, compassionate person who’s experienced a lot of pain, and I’m glad that you’re able to find community because that’s the most important thing in life.
@Amadan put it in much nicer and more coherent way, and I suppose there’s just no way for me to understand your perspective. You seem to be aware of the contradictions, of the problem of evil, of the injustice of eternal damnation, so you do all this work to find an interpretation of Christianity that doesn’t make God to be evil. But why? Why not reject Christianity in favour of something like Gnosticism or Zoroastrianism or just personal spirituality, or say the Bible is the imperfect work of man and that God is best known through personal revelation?
Hey no worries I forgive ya. Sounds like you have been through a lot in your time as well. I hope you find a community, if you don't have one already.
I mean, the short answer to me is that I tried all the gnosticism and buddhism and other personal spirituality for a long, long time and it didn't work. Well over ten years. Perhaps it's utilitarian of me, but coming to Christ is the first thing that started to make my life better when I was in a really difficult place. I was extremely skeptical when I first starting considering it, and frankly I still have a lot of doubts and questions and wonder what the heck I'm even doing. But I know that I feel much better, and act as a much better person, when I go to church regularly, pray, and invest in my faith.
Jordan Peterson talks a lot about different kinds of truths. There's 'objective' truth (which has a lot of problems), but there's also a sort of personal truth, or experiential truth, or narrative truth. He pulls heavily from Carl Jung as well. John Vervaeke has a great series going into the distinction at points too, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis While I don't fully agree with the Peterson/Jung framework anymore, it helped me realize that there is more to life than 'objective' truth, and opened the range of what I would consider as a realistic worldview quite a bit.
Anyway, conversions are complicated and messy things ultimately. I couldn't really explain exactly how it happened even if I wanted to, nobody can. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity, and I took it. It's not always easy but I am grateful as my life has, as I said, gotten far better in almost every way.
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Reported for violating rule:
Why should I believe in God? Why should I believe in Hell? Why should I believe in an eternal soul that outlives my body? Why should I believe anything written in the Bible? Why should I believe anything a bunch of ignorant dead men said?
Why are you even in this thread if you don't believe in God? If you don't, the entire topic is moot so you can ignore it and go about your day.
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This is inflammatory/antagonistic. Report things violating the rules, don't tell people you are reporting them for violating the rules. If it bothers you a bunch don't respond to the person.
Because generally if it doesn't break the rules and you just reported it then we can just click approve and move on. But if you are going to make pronouncements about the rules we have to correct the public record.
So no, claiming that the Christian god exists is not partisan and inflammatory. I say that as an atheist. People do not need to justify the entire basis of their beliefs just to speak here. We don't require conservatives to prove that tradition is good and useful. We don't require progressives to prove inequality is bad. We don't require communists to justify the labor theory of value. We don't require libertarians to provide their ideal alternative to government.
The rules are not meant to be used as a bludgeon to silence people. They are specifically meant to stop people from doing that.
Not the actual point, but would love to see someone treaty to steelman the labor theory of value. It just seems so obviously wrong (a man who digs a hole with a shovel does less work than a man with a spoon but the output is the same)
It's not worth it. Marx's version is a pure motte and bailey argument. It's labor value when you need to prove workers are being exploited. It's subjective value when you are proving the labor theory of value is true
They'll run you in a very long circle where labor value is only real when it has "use value". What is "use value" ... Well it's a subjective and it depends on what people are willing to pay for it
I had an econ professor tell me basically that in college. I didn't believe him, I was libertarian at the time but it seemed to simple and reductive of their views. I went and argued with communists multiple different times on debate a communist back on Reddit. Over a year I did like two or three mega threads that would reach 300-500 comments. About a third of the comments were me arguing by myself against the rest of the subreddit there. Another third arguing back against me, and the last third arguing with and correcting each other. Lots of blood sweat and tears to realize the professor was correct.
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I don't see how your example follows from labor theory of value. The man with the shovel had done the same work, faster. The man with an excavator would have done the same work even faster. But if he'd rented the excavator out instead, how is it obvious that he'd been the one to do the work, rather than the hired worker?
At its core, the argument for labor theory of value is that something has value equal to the amount of labor put in to making the object.
The guy with the shovel out in X hours. The guy with the spoon put in X + Y hours.
Okay, but if we then say “we don’t really mean that; we only mean that at the end of the day labor is necessary and thus all of the value ought to go labor” we still have a problem. The worker with the shovel is more productive because of the shovel. That is, the the shovel (capital) was needed to eliminate Y hours. It is far from obvious why the value of eliminating Y hours ought to rebound solely to the laborer and not the capital owner.
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You know what, we don't mod people for reporting posts, no matter how stupid and baseless the report (I have asked @ZorbaTHut, and his position is that we should not under any circumstances make people afraid to use the report button), so this is not an official mod warning. But I'm just going to tell you directly: stop being a jerk. Do not abuse the report button.
"Proactively provide evidence" is an excuse often used to report posts that the reporter strongly disagrees with. Positions or beliefs you strongly disagree with are not inherently "inflammatory" just because you don't like them, and in particular, belief in gods is not "partisan" in a culture war sense or the sense in which we discourage people from making inflammatory, evidence-free, partisan claims. This forum is an offshoot of an offshoot of rationalist forums, but it is not by charter a rationalist or atheist forum.
If someone started preaching that other people are going to go to hell if they don't accept Jesus, or that only Catholics will go to heaven and everyone else is damned, or that Catholics are damned because they worship the Pope, or that the fire awaits all who do not accept Allah and his Prophet, we'd probably mod them for being obnoxious and using the forum for soapboxing. But a post talking about theology or belief in God is not against forum rules.
This is coming from an atheist: don't be That Kind of Atheist. If you can't stand to engage with religious people at all, just scroll on by.
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As far as I'm aware, those rules apply only to the Culture War Thread, and not to main Motte posts. I'd be happy to ask @self_made_human or @cjet79 for clarification though.
The rules apply everywhere. I'll address ace directly this post does not violate the rules.
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I read OP as "conditional on believing in {the Christian God, hell, eternal souls, etc}, you should believe in non-eternal hell", not as "you should believe in {...}". That makes it not particularly inflammatory nor partisan (unless we have a large contingent of ardent infernalists around), and given that this is hardly well-trodden ground for the forum I don't think it's obviously below evidential standards for the topic. You might make a charge of irrelevance, but I think we have a lot of Christians or Christianity-curious people here, and for the rest of us it's an interesting enough view into a strange mindset.
Hah I'm glad you think it's an interesting view, even if it's still a strange mindset.
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Is it the universalist belief that Satan will also be reconciled with God?
Depends on the universalist belief. Personally I believe all human souls will be reconciled - I don't go as far as the demons and Satan. Some like Origen did, however. That's much closer to heresy in my view.
In your mind how is the idea of a human being eternally damned irreconcilable with the a loving God, but not a fallen angel?
Good question! I don't really know or understand much about angels, not going to lie. They seem less like persons and more like forces of nature in a way. Then again Satan must've had free will since he betrayed God. I suppose I'm not an angel so I'm not as bothered.
But yeah to be consistent I guess the demons would have to be saved in eternity too.
You don't need to be consistent, and I mean that in general. But especially when it comes to theology it's often a trap. I forget who it was that said, "At the root of every heresy is a sincere effort to resolve an apparent contradiction."
Angels are a qualitatively different sort of being than humans. Angels exist sort of timelessly in that each decides once and forever whether to be loyal or disloyal to the Existing One, and is thereafter incapable of change. Also, God became man, not angel. We're just talking about totally different things here. Their minds are not like ours, their internal experiences are not like ours, etc.
Interesting! I appreciate the clarification.
And yeah, I'm not too into logical consistency which is part of why I'm Orthodox hah. I follow my heart before my reason.
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